Nvidia Joins 28nm Graphics Race with "Kepler" Architecture

As expected, Nvidia today announced its entrant into the 28nm graphics market. The unveiled family of desktop and mobile chips promisies to be twice as efficient as its earlier 40nm architecture and deliver better graphics performance and smoother visuals.

As expected, Nvidia today announced its entrantance into the 28nm graphics market. The unveiled family of desktop and mobile chips promises to be twice as efficient as its earlier 40nm architecture and deliver better graphics performance and smoother visuals.

The new chips, which use an architecture known as "Kepler" will be sold as GeForce GTX 680 for desktops and as the GT 600 family for notebooks. Nvidia will compete with AMD's recently announced "Southern Islands" 28nm chips, starting with the high-end Radeon 7970, which has been shipping for a few months.

Nvidia says the new system will be the fastest and most power-efficient GPU ever built. The GTX 680 desktop version has 192 CUDA graphics cores in each of its SMX blocks (which combine control logic and the rendering cores) and has eight blocks for a total of 1,536 graphics cores, rendering units, compared with the 512 cores in the 40nm GTX 580, based on the "Fermi" architecture.

In addition, it requires only 195 watts of power, compared with the 250 watts required by the GTX 580 and by AMD's 7970 card. This lets it draw less power and create less noise while still producing more performance. Each GPU can support up to four displays from a single GPU, and can now run three monitors in 3D vision surround from a single GPU (versus two GPUs required in the previous generation).

The new cards also add what Nvidia is calling fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA) and temporal anti-aliasing (TXAA). It improves anti-aliasing quality and speed and is designed to reduce stuttering and improve the visual impacts, as well as Nvidia's 3D and PhysX technologies. It also has support for multiple GPUs for most of the high-end games.

One difference is that now there are more cores but they all share a single clock, as opposed to using a double clock with fewer cores in the previous generation. This makes it more power-efficient, says Justin Walker, a senior GeForce product manager. In addition, it now uses a technique called "GPU boost," which lets all of the cores increase in speed when the chip has extra headroom. The basic clock runs at 1006 MHz as a minimum, with boost at 1058 MHz.

Walker said that Epic's "Samaritan" demo required three GTX 580s to run at last year's Game Developers Conference, but at this year's conference it could run on a single GTX 680.

The basic card, with 2GB of 256-bit DDR5 memory, will carry a suggested retail price of $499. Partners may offer overclocked versions.

In addition, Nvidia launched its GeForce GT 600 family of notebook processors, specifically the GT 640M, based on the same overall architecture. Nvidia said this should enable lighter, slimmer notebooks with discrete graphics that still get great battery life. In particular, the company compared the Acer Timeline Ultra M3 with the GT 640M—a five pound, 20mm thick notebook designed to get eight hours of battery life—with a year-old Alienware laptop from that has the same graphics performance but weighed eight pounds, was 50mm thick, and only got three hours of battery life.

In the notebook space, Nvidia stressed how its discrete graphics chips could play all of the popular games at high frame rates. The 640M should be in the middle of the notebook graphics line, with other chips ranging from the low-end 620M to the high-end GTX 675M.

The new GeForce lines will face off against AMD's Radeon graphics family, and I'll leave it to others to do the benchmarks once the boards and notebooks really ship. Both companies will be also be touting how much better discrete graphics play games than integrated graphics do, specifically targeting Intel's current Sandy Bridge and upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs. We'll better be able to compare this when Ivy Bridge finally ships, now expected to start late next month.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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